Airports and I have a love hate relationship. Sometimes they bring me, sometimes they take me. Sometimes they bring him, sometimes they take him.

What’s the problem with having individual interests and goals? You sometimes have to leave behind the ones you love to reach them.

What’s that feel like? Any kind of loss has the same stomach dropping feeling. We can argue the different severities of loss but at the end of the day, in the moment, a loss is a loss. Take a piece from your heart and put it behind a glass door that you can’t get through. Maybe you get to open the glass door in a few weeks, maybe in a few years… or maybe you lose that piece for forever. To be straight forward, it’s not generally an uplifting feeling.

Until Next Time

The moment of a loss that I’m pinpointing today is when we take that piece from our heart and put it behind the glass “until next time”. The awful feeling when you watch someone you love walk away from your car and enter the doors of an airport. You pull away with tears falling down your face while trying to navigate getting out of the airport as cars are merging in all around you. It’s not the most pleasant situation you’d probably like to find yourself in. It’s always a great contrast from the nerves and excitement of seeing your loved one after enduring the same goodbye the last time.

The last hug is the moment when your mental understanding and physical actions align. Letting go of the embrace means that you have just completed the physical part of mentally saying goodbye to someone. We cry during the hug only because we are fearing the next moment in which we let go. We cry after the hug because now we fear the next moments of life in which we notice their absence.

It Doesn’t Get Easier

It’s never a walk in the park. I have said many goodbyes to my partner. Some more permanent than others and it never seems to get easier, especially if the situation is familiar and I know it will be an extended period of time until we see each other again. I am always happy for him because he leaves on a mission to reach a goal or to follow an interest but sad because of the absence of him in my day to day life.

Since the beginning of our history together, my partner and I have always been very close. We always have had two contrasts; living together or across the country from each other. Having such a contrast makes these goodbyes so much harder. You go from seeing this person everyday when you wake up and everyday after work to knowing nothing else except for their name coming up on your phone as a missed call. Only three short months ago I was anxiously picking him up from the airport after not seeing him for five months and today he walked out of my car and onto a plane jetting 3000km away. And so the cycle will continue to repeat from extreme joy to extreme sadness until we can both merge onto our more permanent pathway together.

Time to Put the Umbrella Away

At the end of the day, this lifestyle is a choice. If I wanted to I could have gotten on that plane with him today but I chose to stay in Ontario for a little while longer for my own financial benefit. If he wanted to he could have stayed in Ontario for a little longer as well, but the mountains are calling him. It’s important to us to keep moving forward as individuals but it’s also important to experience our emotions along the way.

It’s okay to be sad, it’s okay to cry. What a beautiful thing it is to love someone so much that you can almost feel your hearts tearing as you both walk in opposite directions. To feel so strongly about someone that it brings tears to your eyes. To have so many wonderful memories in places with this person that driving by them evokes an immense feeling deep down inside you. As sad as I may feel when we say goodbye, I also am incredibly blessed to have something so special to me that makes me feel differently than anyone or thing is this world can. It makes these spurts of living through a long distance relationship a little more bearable.

He texted me today before his flight took off saying “It’s okay to be sad, just don’t be sad for too long“. In translation; “I’m sad too but we chose this so let’s make the best of it“.

So onto tomorrow we go and stayed tuned for more adventures.

TGFD

As a side note; thank goodness for dogs. They really just seem to know. I am a dog fanatic and my Labradors always seem to soothe a sad soul. As I lay here writing about this, tab open tracking his flight, with tears welling up in my eyes, I have my loyal pooch curled up between my legs. It makes life a little brighter today that’s for sure.